Tiziano Sclavi was born in
Broni (
Pavia) on 3 April 1953, his mother was a teacher and his father was a communal secretary. He had lived his childhood and first youth in the
Province of Pavia, mainly in
Stradella,
Canneto Pavese and
Certosa di Pavia. Due to the job of the father, Sclavi had moved from a town to another: Sclavi has been a passionate reader since childhood: he claims he read the entire production of
Edgar Allan Poe when he was between six and seven years old, The stories he wrote for
Corriere dei Piccoli were collected in the volume
I misteri di Mystère ("Mystère's Mysteries") by
Editore Bietti in 1974 (then published by
Arnoldo Mondadori Editore). When
Corriere dei Ragazzi was closed in 1977, Sclavi began to collaborate with
Il Corriere dei Piccoli, writing comic series like
Allister,
Miki,
Fantòm becoming then its editor and writing its stories until 1988. Sclavi returned to write for
Zagor on the 1990 special spin-off dedicated to
Cico, the Mexican sidekick of Zagor, entitled
Horror Cico. Since 1982, he had written also screenplays for
Mister No, with a little contamination of the horror genre. The Italian
Pilot offered both authorial and traditional comics from Italian and French authors, but it was closed together with
Orient Express in 1985 with the issue #15. Following these flops, Bonelli decided to return to work on traditional comics. The creation of the character began a year before when
Sergio Bonelli, owner of the publishing house, and
Decio Canzio, general director, preferred to return to work on traditional comics and eventually to create new ones. Sclavi proposed a horror series, temporarily called
Dylan Dog. and
Decio Canzio, editor in chief of the series at the time, remembers that: After a few years,
Dylan Dog became a
best seller: the first
Horror Fest convention of horror cinema was organized in 1987 in honour to the success of
Dylan Dog, and in 1990 Sclavi won the Yellow Kid prize as best author. and, from 1987 to 1991, Sclavi published on
Comic Art three stories of the
Roy Mann series
New millennium In the 2000s, Sclavi remained as supervisor of the series of Dylan Dog, leaving the role of screenwriter. In 2005, Sclavi gave more than 8 000 volumes to the Communal Library of
Venegono Superiore, collected and preserved in the
Fondo Sclavi which collects volumes about cinema, music, a wide collection of comics and books about comics, novels of various genres (crime, noir and science-fiction), studies on occultism and paranormal phenomena, photographic volumes and books about graphic. In 2006, Sclavi wrote a story for a Dylan Dog issue published in 2006 == CICAP member ==